The Pink Leopard blog

Rainbow silver beet, leek and fetta tart

Trish Gallagher

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

I can honestly say that I never remember my mum making a quiche from scratch, despite the fact that she was a pretty good cook. Why would you bother slaving away at dicing ham, beating eggs and making pastry when a sheer miracle from a box can be ready in 35 minutes (taste and texture aside)?

When I was young, shortly after my father passed away, my mum made a life changing yet perplexing discovery – the frozen quiche.

I had a quick lesson in the workings of grief by what was served to me in those years my mother mourned. Frozen this and tinned that all got a bit too much, but the frozen quiche was the deal breaker.

I suppose ‘quiche’ to our suburban life in the eighties was très exotic. It even sounded posh (as opposed to a Chiko Roll) but the frozen varieties back then were cardboard nonsense. Symmetrical ham chunks, floury pastry (if you can call it that) and the eggs – oh my, those weren’t eggs. Mixed with some iceberg lettuce and a tomato or two, you had yourself a right French knees-up of a meal.

I can honestly say that I never remember my mum making a quiche from scratch, despite the fact that she was a pretty good cook. Why would you bother slaving away at dicing ham, beating eggs and making pastry when a sheer miracle from a box can be ready in 35 minutes (taste and texture aside)?

I would like to tell you that packaged quiches have come leaps and bounds since those heady days of the Florentine frenzy - I can’t because I haven’t had one since 1983. But I have made them and variations alike.

One of my first attempts at spanakopita was from a free book courtesy of the Hare Krishna movement. I was still at school and grateful to get my hands on any cookbooks that I could. It used ghee instead of butter (this was Cabramatta in 1983 – ghee was non-existent) but everything else was readily accessible. It was from this humble Hare Krishna cookery book that I discovered a whole new world of the egg-spinach-pastry-combo and I have been experimenting ever since. From that day forward I never laid eyes on a cardboard box full of French falsification again.

I bought some rainbow silverbeet from the farmers market last weekend and I knew instantly that it was destined for a fetta and leek bed. This is still a quick mid-week meal if you use shortcrust pastry, as opposed to laborious filo, and, like most things, tastes even better the next day.

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